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INTRODUCTION The Vibrant Body of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales, Which Do Not Belong to the Grimms The example of the Brothers Grimm had its imitators even in Russia, including the person of the first editor of Russian Folk Tales, A. N. Afanasyev. From the viewpoint of contemporary folkloristics, even a cautious reworking and stylization of the texts, written down from their performers, is considered absolutely inadmissible in scientific edi- tions. But in the era of the Brothers Grimm, in the world of romantic ideas and principles, this was altogether permissible. To the credit of the Brothers Grimm, it must be added that they were almost the first to establish the principle of publication of the authentic, popular oral poetic productions. — Y. M. Sokolov, Russian Folklore (1966)1 It is the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who illustrate the connec- tion between folklore and textual criticism most powerfully, just as they demonstrate the continuing influence of Herder on thought. Nationalist politics and folkloric endeavours intertwine throughout all the Grimm brothers’ projects, but the Europe-wide significance of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (first edition 1812) was the inspiration it provided to proto- folklorists to go out and collect “vom Volksmund,” that is from the mouth of the people (whether or not this was the Grimms’ own practice). — Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century (2012)2 Just what is a legacy, and what was the corpus of folk and fairy tales that the Broth- ers Grimm passed on to the German people—a corpus that grew, expanded, and eventually spread itself throughout the world? What do we mean when we talk about cultural legacy and memory? Why have the Grimms’ so- called German 1 2 INTRODUCTION tales spread throughout the world and become so universally international? Have the Grimms’ original intentions been betrayed? Did they betray them? If we fail to address these questions, the cultural legacy of the Grimms’ tales and their relevance cannot be grasped. This does not mean that there are right and wrong answers. Rather, the questions set a framework for inquiry that will lead to greater insight into the Grimms’ legacies, for there is more than just one that they bequeathed to the German people. There are several definitions of legacy in the Oxford Universal Dictionary, and the most pertinent one for my purposes concerns legacy as a bequest: “what one bequeaths . anything handed down by an ancestor or a predecessor.”3 But legacy also carries with it a notion of binding or connecting something to some- one as in the Italian verb legare— to bind, to connect, to attach. And I want to suggest that the Grimms bound themselves to a German popular tradition of storytelling through the collecting of tales that belonged to the German people. Whether these tales actually belonged to the German people is irrelevant here because the Grimms assumed that these tales, largely gathered on Hessian and Westphalian soil, emanated from the lips of German people, primarily from the lower classes but also from the upper classes. What counts is their assumption, and what counts is their firm belief in the ancient origins of storytelling. What counts is that they wanted to discover and forge a German heritage that had greater cultural value than they realized. The Grimms wanted to save the folk and fairy tales from extinction and to bequeath this Naturpoesie as a gift to the German people of all social classes. Here is what they state in the first volume of the first edition of 1812: We have tried to grasp and interpret these tales as purely as possi- ble. In many of them one will find that the narrative is interrupted by rhymes and verses that even possess clear alliteration at times but are never sung during the telling of a tale, and these are pre- cisely the oldest and best tales. No incident has been added or embellished and changed, for we would have shied away from ex- panding tales already so rich in and of themselves with their own analogies and similarities. They cannot be invented. In this regard no collection like this one has yet to appear in Germany. The tales have almost always been used as stuff to create longer stories which have been arbitrarily expanded and changed depending on their value. They have always been ripped from the hands of children even though they belonged to them, and nothing was given back to them in return. Even those people who thought about the chil- dren could not restrain themselves from mixing in mannerisms Vibrant Body of Grimms’ Tales 3 of contemporary writing. Diligence in collecting has almost al- ways been lacking. Just a few, noted by chance, were immediately published. Had we been so fortunate to be able to tell the tales in a very particular dialect they would have undoubtedly gained a great deal. Here we have a case where all the accomplishments of education, refinement, and artistic command of language ruin everything, and where one feels that a purified literary language as elegant as it may be for everything else, brighter and more trans- parent, has here, however, become more tasteless and cannot get to the heart of the matter. We offer this book to well-meaning hands and thereby think chiefly of the blessed power that lies in these hands. We wish they will not allow these tiny morsels of poetry to be kept entirely hid- den from poor and modest readers.4 And in the preface to the second volume of the first edition published in 1815, they state: Our collection was not merely intended to serve the history of poetry but also to bring out the poetry itself that lives in it and make it effective: enabling it to bring pleasure wherever it can and also therefore, enabling it to become an actual educational primer. Objections have been raised against this last point because this or that might be embarrassing and would be unsuitable for children or offensive (when the tales might touch on certain situations and relations— even the mentioning of the bad things that the devil does) and that parents might not want to put the book into the hands of children. That concern might be legitimate in certain cases, and then one can easily make selections. On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nature itself provides our best evidence, for it has allowed these and those flowers and leaves to grow in their own colors and shapes. If they are not beneficial for any per- son or personal needs, something that the flowers and leaves are unaware of, then that person can walk right by them, but the in- dividual cannot demand that they be colored and cut according to his or her needs. Or, in other words, rain and dew provide a benefit for everything on earth. Whoever is afraid to put plants outside because they might be too delicate and could be harmed and would rather water them inside cannot demand to put an end to the rain and the dew. Everything that is natural can also become 4 INTRODUCTION beneficial. And that is what our aim should be. Incidentally, we are not aware of a single salutary and powerful book that has edified the people, in which such dubious matters don’t appear to a great extent, even if we place the Bible at the top of the list. Making the right use of a book doesn’t result in finding evil, rather, as an appealing saying puts it: evidence of our hearts. Children read the stars without fear, while others, according to folk belief, insult an- gels by doing this.5 I have quoted extensively from the two prefaces of the first edition because they significantly embody the early intentions of the Grimms’ legacy of tales that they bequeathed to the German people. What is striking, I believe, about their language is their inclination to use metaphors of nature, religion, and edu- cation. This is also the language of German romanticism—idealistic and some- what mystical. For the Grimms the folk and fairy tales were divinely inspired and pure. They evolved organically, encapsulating human experience and be- havior, and it was through the common people if not people of all social classes that their “essential” messages were remembered and articulated. These mes- sages contained information and truths about human experience, but they were not didactic commandments or lessons. As I have stated in the introduction to my translation of the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales):6 Though mindful of the educational value of their collection, the Grimms shied away from making the tales in their collection moralistic or overly didactic. They viewed the morality in the tales as naïve and organic, and readers, young and old, could intuit lessons from them spontaneously because of their “pure” poetry. In his book, Einfache Formen (Simple Forms, 1930) André Jolles claims that the Grimms saw a paradoxical morality in the miraculous events of folk and fairy tales alike. Jolles writes that the basic foundation of these tales derives from the paradox that the miraculous is not miraculous in the fairy tale; rather it is natural, self-evident, a matter of course. “The miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.”7 The readers’ in- terpretations of folk and fairy tales are natural because of the profound if not divine nature of the tales, and in this sense, the Grimms envisioned themselves as moral cultivators of a particular cultural heritage and their collection as an educational primer of ethics, values, and customs that would grow on readers who would grow by reading these living relics of the past and also by retell- ing them.

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